[ExI] Trump Says a Smart President Is All That’s Needed to Rein In A.I.

[spike at rainier66.com]

>...> On Behalf Of Adrian Tymes via extropy-chat
Subject: Re: [ExI] Trump Says a Smart President Is All That’s Needed to Rein In A.I.

>>... spike jones via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>>... Of the data centers going in, I know of none which are building wind energy to power them.  Do you know of any?

...

> China's Offshore Underwater Facility: Located off the coast of Shanghai, this commercial project links pressure-sealed server capsules directly to an offshore wind farm, using seawater for cooling to drop energy consumption significantly....
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OK cool, literally.  Thx Adrian.

I have been thinking of how to build out these facilities in such a way as to have the cooling resources associated with gas, coal and nuclear power.

These three examples don't say how the data centers deal with unpredictability and intermittency of wind power, but when I do the calculations, it appears data centers are not a good fit for either intermittency or unpredictability.  Reasoning: there is enormous capital cost associated with all those GPUs.  You can't afford to have them sitting idle, ever, particularly in light of how quickly GPUs depreciate.  A six year old GPU is exactly worthless now for data center use: they devour far more energy and water than the value of their output.

OK then, assume we need power always available at a level sufficient to keep all those expensive short-lived GPUs humming steadily, and that we cannot take power out of the grid ever, but can sell it back into the grid if the demand is sufficient and the price is compelling.  Now assume that because of the recent actions of the Supreme Court, the executive branch no longer has the authority to declare carbon dioxide a pollutant.  Given that, a natural gas plant emits no pollutants.  A coal plant can be particulate-filtered and catalyzed so that it too emits (almost) no pollutants.  Those guys emit carbon dioxide and water, neither of which are pollutants.  

But plenty of water.  We still need cooling water for those two types of power plants.

OK, China's project sounds like something that needs cooling water.  Wind energy doesn't need that, for they can cool the lubricating oil with radiators dumping the waste heat directly into the air.  But coal, gas and nuclear all need cooling water.  

So my question is this: if we had a floating coal or gas plant, can we dump the waste heat directly into seawater without the need for a fresh water supply?  Seems to me we aughta be able to send the low pressure steam to submerged heat exchangers, and run the GPUs also on floating platforms way out there, dump the waste heat from those rigs into submerged radiators, still in US waters but far enough out there that it would be out of sight of shore and the exhaust plume would blow out to sea.  Perhaps the greens would go back to worrying about tortoises and such, and we still get our data centers and as a bonus, we get to keep the possibility that an American AI kills everybody rather than a Chinese AI enslaves everybody.

spike